Manager, Application Production Support

1. SCOPE OF POSITION

The Manager, Application Production Support, is responsible for planning, coordinating and managing all activities related to the support of applications and tools in the production environment.  These applications and business tools will be used across all business areas.

The Manage, Application Production Support will need to clearly document the portfolio of applications and tools the team is responsible for supporting, who the user contacts are, what service levels are expected or agreed to, and define the process on how support will be provided and by whom on the team. The Manager is responsible to lead the team to review and approve any promotion processes with the Solution Development team and define and establish escalation processes to engage the Enterprise Architecture team for Production support.

For the enterprise level application systems, the Application Production Support team is responsible for the operational support and administration for all environment including production, testing and development environments, software tools, hardware, and integration services.

The Manager, Application Production Support, is responsible to ensure proper management and user communication processes are defined and established for any critical system outages or issues.

1. PRINCIPAL FUNCTIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES

• Plan, manage and provide direction to the team; managing workloads to ensure proper distribution across the team as well as identifying skill gaps amongst team members and design training/resource plans to address these gaps.
• Ensure the responsibilities of the team are well documented, fully covered and with adequate cross training and mutual back-up.
• Lead the team to identify, document and plan all key system promotions managing within a specified timeline ensuring all issues are escalated appropriately and in a timely manner.
• Establish escalation processes to engage the Enterprise Architecture team for Production support.
• Work with the business technology support managers and business representatives to gather any technology issues and concerns from business groups and work with the vendors to ensure that together we address them effectively.
• Ensure the team is in compliance with the established /IBM Change management processes.
• Participate in the IT Change and Problem Management processes to help identify potential impacts due to changes proposed or planned.
• Produce regular management reports to the Director and/or senior TS management with assessment, trending of Production application availability and issues with recommendations for remedial actions and improvements.
• Provide input and participate in the budgeting process as required.

1. RESPONSIBILITIES AS A MEMBER OF A MANAGEMENT TEAM

Play a leading role in the development of strategies and plans for TS and, on approval, translate these goals into objectives and plans.

Develop and maintain technology standards and staff culture that provides effective and flexible support of client departments and projects in support their operating goals and business initiatives.

1. MANAGERIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

• Directly supervise a team of 7 analysts in the performance of support activities.
• Determine department’s priorities, work methods and provide input to staffing needs.
• Assign, coordinate and maintain work standards for a department through the use of Key Performance Objectives (KPOs) for all employees.
• Plan, organize, integrate and measure the work of the component in keeping with a participative management style.
• Staff the component within authorized levels.
• Provide skills development opportunities for people in own department/area, compatible with both  needs and personal goals and foster a strong commitment to learning.
• Provide leadership and coaching to build a high performing team capable of delivering on the IT strategy.
• Develop and maintain technology standards and staff culture that provides effective and flexible support of client departments and projects in support of their operating goals and business initiatives.
• Plan, organize, integrate and measure technology standards in keeping with a client-focused and participatory management style.

1. RELATIONSHIP RESPONSIBILITIES

• Develop internal relationships with  business leaders to determine the key initiatives and levels of customer service required for the achievement of business goals.

• Promote and oversee strategic relationships between internal TS resources and external entities, including the major vendor and other partner organizations.

6 POSITION REQUIREMENTS

Formal Education & Certification

• University degree in an Information Technology field, with at least 10 years experience of application development and support, with at least 2 years being in a management or supervisory role.

Knowledge & Experience

• Proven effective leadership skills.
• Excellent relationship and organizational skills honed in years of working effectively with IT application vendors and internal users and other IT support teams.
• Strong technical knowledge and experience of the IT environment at  or similar installations.
• Direct working knowledge of Change and Problem management methodologies.
• Proven analytical and problem solving skills and ability to help prioritize and manage the resolution of critical problems or conflict.
• Proven experience in managing IT service delivery in an enterprise environment with high quality results

System Experience

The Manager should be experienced in managing support team which supports technologies including but not limited to:

• IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM Business Process Management.
• Oracle Databases, Oracle Reports server, Oracle Content Management, Oracle Identity and Access Management, Oracle Financials, Oracle e-Business.
• OpenText Livelink, Kofax, Cognos reporting, BI/BO modules, IBM AIX/Power platform, VMware/Windows 2008, Red Hat Linux.

Personal Attributes

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, and the ability to communicate with different levels of management.
• Superior interpersonal and teamwork skills.

• Ability to work well under pressure; effectively manage competing priorities and escalate issues as required.